


DESPAIR

by Stormvoël (BushRat8)



Category: Pirates of the Caribbean (Movies)
Genre: Consumption, Death of the Innkeeper, F/M, Heartbreak, Illness, Innkeeper-centric, Loneliness, tuberculosis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-06
Updated: 2018-04-06
Packaged: 2019-04-18 19:02:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14219712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BushRat8/pseuds/Stormvo%C3%ABl
Summary: Barbossa's been gone for four endless years, and though she remains steadfast in her love, the innkeeper has all but lost hope of ever seeing him again.Takes place between the two chapters of WIDOW'S WALK.  Feels like THE MAN OF THE HOUSE, only ramped up a hundredfold.





	DESPAIR

**Author's Note:**

> The disease called "consumption" in the 18th century was what we know as tuberculosis. Bacterial in nature, the innkeeper likely contracted it between a combination of a compromised immune system, and being around sick men when she visited the tavern to obtain her wine. She's otherwise had a reasonably strong constitution most of her life, but grief and a lack of self-care, resulting in malnutrition, have worn her down. Her drastic loss of weight was typical of TB, and was why it was called consumption in the first place.
> 
> A dory is a small flat-bottomed rowboat with a high bow and stern, generally used for fishing. Jack Sparrow's _Jolly Mon_ from the beginning of _Curse of the Black Pearl_ was a dory.

 

 

 

-oOo-

 

 

 

 

 

She's spent weeks and months and years anxiously watching the sea and praying for him to come home, but if her prayers are being answered, it's with a resounding "No!"  
  
Over their time together, the innkeeper has sorely missed Barbossa every minute he's been away, but it's not been like this;  never like this.  Not with the sick feeling that her beloved is finally lost to her;  that some terrible thing has befallen him and wrenched him away;  that even though he might wish to return to her, he never will.  Four years and more it's been, and there's been no word, no hint of where he is or what he's doing, and she's afraid that a battle or noose has taken his life.    
  
Worse still is the feeling that he might be alive, but with another woman, living with her, caring for her, smiling at her over the dinner table, taking her into his arms and his bed.  
  
The innkeeper knows it's terribly selfish, this uneasy feeling that she'd prefer him dead to loving and being loved by another, but she can't help it.  She's spent her whole life with her heart lost to her dearest Hector, doing everything she could to make him happy, and this is her reward?  She's always forced herself to understand how he might need the services of a paid companion;  but, although the thought of him with a whore makes her angry and jealous, they're not the women she's really afraid of.  
  
She barely dares think it, but… has someone else done what she herself couldn't:  given him a child?  
  
_That_ thought makes her curl up on the floor, sleepless and sobbing in heartbreak, night after night.  
  
_I tried so hard to be everything he needed,_   she thinks, not bothering to brush the tears from her eyes.  _But he must be tired of me, or else I'd have had a letter or some kind of message;  I'd have had something.  How could he vanish without so much as a word?_  
  
The innkeeper's thoughts become more muddled by the day;  so much, that she fails to recall the shine of almost-tears in Barbossa's blue eyes and the way he whispered his tender affection in her ear on the morning he last left.  Somehow, it doesn't occur to her that she's wearing his symbol:  a snake twining its way around a ruby;  the pendant he always gives her when he leaves as a promise of his return;  the one she clasps around his neck in welcome on the day he next comes home.  She's forgotten how he so solemnly kissed his gift of the black pearl ring and admonished her never to sell it, saying that it would break his heart beyond bearing if she did.  But with all she forgets of the ephemeral things which bind their hearts together, she still manages to hold on to the dark sound of his voice and the taste of him in her mouth;  the calloused scratch of his hands, the tickle of his beard, and the hardness and heat of his body within her and all around her.  
  
Fearing that it will slip away, she tries to grasp at that feeling, lying naked on her bed, moaning with the desire to receive him deep inside, but all that touches her flesh is cold air that raises goosebumps and murmurs cruelly of loss.  If she didn't have Barbossa's musky, sweat-scented sheets to hold onto, she'd have nothing left of him at all.  
  
The despair the innkeeper feels claws at her heart, shredding it to tatters;  after years of interminable, draining weeping, she is empty of tears, able only to feel a dry, silent, icy loneliness that whitens her hair and puts dark, haunted circles beneath her eyes:  eyes that ceaselessly sweep the horizon for the outlines of the _Black Pearl_ that will tell her Hector Barbossa is coming home.  Ill and unable to eat, she grows frail and thin, her once-ample breasts shrunken and her hips gone sharp with bones, unlike the softly-rounded woman in whom her Captain found such comfort.  
  
Barbossa would barely recognize what she's become, save by the black pearl ring that's grown far too loose to wear on her finger, and the serpent pendant around her neck.  
  
Though the innkeeper might not eat much of anything anymore, she's lately become intemperate in her drinking in the effort to drown her misery.  Twice a week, she fetches back a half-dozen bottles of wine from the tavern;  the same heady red wine that was Barbossa's favorite.  She sips it from his goblet little by little, but even those sips are too much for one heretofore used only to tea or lemon water;  and, every time, she pays for her intoxication the next morning on her knees in the back garden, arms crossed over her belly and eyes squeezed tight as the ungainly sickness of excess takes her.  
  
When the deep cough begins, she tries to ignore it, but she chances to come across the town's doctor some months later during one of her short trips to the marketplace.  "You look terrible!"  he exclaims in a scolding tone.  "What have you been doing to yourself?"  
  
The innkeeper shrugs.  "I'm… all right."  
  
The physician eyes her;  then, without asking, lays a hand on her forehead.  "You've a fever,"  he tells her,  "and that cough is dreadful.  Now, tell me:  how long has this been going on?"  
  
"I… I don't know…"    
  
The innkeeper suddenly starts to cough again, putting her forearm up in front of her mouth out of automatic politeness, and that's when the doctor sees the streak of blood on her sleeve.  "Go home,"  he says sternly.  "Go home and rest.  I'll be paying you a visit shortly and we'll see what can be done about putting you right."  
  
He shows up at Grantham House some two hours later with an assortment of medicines and the tools of his physician's trade, looking upward to spot the innkeeper slowly pacing the widow's walk.  Approaching her, he takes her by the arm and tugs her down the stairs.  "You come down from there, Madam, immediately!"  he orders.  
  
A brief examination confirms what he fears:  the innkeeper is mortally ill with consumption, her condition not helped by the fact that she has little interest in continuing to live.  Like everyone else in the town, the doctor knows what's so distressing her;  unlike them, though, he doesn't want to see these last weeks of her life made more wretched than they have to be.  Thus, he takes the innkeeper on as a personal project for two or three hours each day:  bringing her food, nourishing teas, and medicine to ease her lungs, speaking gently to her, and trying his damnedest to insist that she must stay off the windswept widow's walk;  but in that last, while she's still able to stay upright, he fails.  
  
It's only when her fever spikes and sends her into delirium that he manages to keep her tucked in her bed, sitting and listening unhappily as she cries out her love for Barbossa and begs him to come home.  "He'll be back,"  the doctor tells her, for what else should he say when he knows that, unless some miracle intervenes and brings the innkeeper's blue-eyed pirate home before she dies, she'll never see him again?  "He's always come back before;  you know he has."  
  
But the innkeeper isn't fooled;  not this time.  "All my life,"  she sobs,  "and I've never loved anyone else but him…"  
  
"I know, I know,"  the doctor tries to soothe her.  
  
Over the next three weeks, the innkeeper gets sicker and sicker;  within a month, the doctor's visits become a deathwatch as she lies motionless in her bed, grey-faced, coughing up blood and barely able to breathe.  _It's so unfair_ ,  he thinks.  _She shouldn't be dying alone like this;  not without her man to comfort her and hold her hand_.  He knows, as everyone does, that it's all too common for sailors to perish at sea or not be home when their loved ones die, but this seems especially awful.  Barbossa was all the lonely innkeeper lived for, and now she's fading away in her captain's too-long absence.  
  
In the moments before she passes, the doctor is at her side, smoothing the quilt around her — the sea-blue quilt that Barbossa always admired — and listening to her fading soft wheeze as she whispers,  "Hector,"  over and over. "Hector… I love you, Hector… please, don't forget me."  
  
Presently, even those few words are stilled.  
  
The doctor prays silently for the repose of her soul, then does what no one else is around to do:  after carrying three buckets of water from the well, he carefully washes the innkeeper's body, dresses her in the faded but clean clothing he finds in her armoire, brushes her hair, then covers her with the blue quilt until arrangements can be made for a decent burial.  As she has no family save Barbossa — and God only knows where he is or if he's even alive — it will be up to him to take charge.  
  
He immediately runs into trouble.  "Why you?"  his wife snaps peevishly at him.  "She can rot, for all I care, unless that dirty pirate of hers wants to come back and see to her…"  
  
"Shame on you!"  the doctor returns, angered.  "She lived her whole life here;  she deserves at least to go to her grave mourned by someone who knew her, and to have her resting place properly marked…"  
  
And he does mourn her.  In happier times, the innkeeper always had a cheerful smile for him when they passed each other in the marketplace, and often proffered invitations to dinner;  invitations it pleased him to accept because she was an excellent cook and it afforded him respite from the constant, petty bickering of his wife and two daughters;  gave him also the opportunity to relax in the masculine company of Grantham House's lodgers.  While there, he made Barbossa's acquaintance and was surprised to find him intelligent and well-spoken, with a wry, biting wit;  and, perhaps, what _didn't_ surprise him was the love he could feel sparking between pirate and innkeeper as they gazed at each other from opposite ends of the table.  
  
If only he'd ever loved his own wife like that.  
  
The priest of the island's small church has words even harsher when the doctor tries to arrange for a burial plot.  "I'll not have that trollop in the churchyard amongst decent people!"  he barks, his face turning red at even the suggestion of it.  "She lived her life as a strumpet, sir;  now she can go to her grave as one!  And I don't care where that grave is, as long as it's not here!"  
  
The physician stares at him, shocked, then gets up and walks out, vowing to himself never to set foot in the church again.  
  
Unless he plans to throw her to the fishes from someone's dory, that leaves only one place where the innkeeper can be buried:  the island's potter's field atop Lookout Point Hill.  She will lie amongst strangers, paupers, and outcasts, but somehow, the doctor doesn't think she'd really mind all that much, especially when he gets a look at the view:  a broad, sweeping expanse of the sea from whence every ship for days can be seen.  If Captain Barbossa is alive and comes anywhere near the island, she will see him.  
  
The doctor calls for the gravedigger;  the same one who buried the innkeeper's and Barbossa's little Alexander, although he doesn't know about that and the man doesn't tell him.  "A good, solid wooden marker will be fine,"  he says to the gravedigger, giving him the innkeeper's name to be carved on its surface, but nothing else because he doesn't know it.  "Please have it made quickly and installed at once;  I don't like the idea of her lying here as though she were unbeknownst to anyone."  
  
Within two days, the marker stands at the head of the innkeeper's grave and the doctor comes once more to see that all is as it should be, to pray and to leave some flowers, but he does not visit again.  Her death has affected him in a way he finds disturbing, so he says his goodbyes and returns to his house, hoping that her eternity is happier than her final months have been.    
  
But what neither he nor the innkeeper ever learned is that, across the Atlantic in the cold climes of England, a maimed and nearly unrecognizable Hector Barbossa is playacting his way into the service of a king he despises, all to obtain a ship and the letters of marque that will put him one step closer to his revenge against the man who sank the _Black Pearl_ and forced him to hack off his own right leg if he wanted to live.  Both are an agony that consumes his attention to the exclusion of all else, and his life has changed in such extreme ways that he scarcely knows it as his.  He has no desire for fancy women, he's above wanting friends or the camaraderie of his crew, and he drinks even less than he used to.  If he had a life before this one, he's almost, _almost_ forgotten it.    
  
But now and again, late at night when Barbossa's alone in his cabin or trying to rest in his rooms while ashore, the gentle ghost of his clearest, most cherished memory comes to visit.  That's when his chest constricts, he shivers in the remembered pleasure he once knew, and hot tears of longing slide unbidden from his faded blue eyes, burning his cheeks as he holds out his arms and whispers a single word:  "Dove."  

 

  
  
  
  
  
-oOo-  FIN  -oOo- 


End file.
